Marcello is right: well, half-right. One of my biggest regrets last year was not finishing parts 2 and 3 of the ‘Death of Pop’ articles. The plan was to draw a line under the bullishly pro-pop attitudes we’d been espousing here, to explain – to myself as much as anyone – that the case for pop had been made, and to my satisfaction won, and now the point was to expand “pop”, to bring all the other stuff that I listened to and loved back into the fold, and to praise its pop qualities without guilt and oppositional rhetoric. The key thing Marcello has right is that bands like the Strokes and the Hives do make more sense to me – become more enjoyable – when they’re in the charts. There was a moment last Spring when “Pyramid Song” was in the top 5 next to DJ Pied Piper and I thought, yes, this is the kind of chart – the kind of ‘pop’ – I care about hearing. I should have written about that.
But for a lot of reasons I didn’t. For personal reasons it’s been easier to coast on my opinions, take the easy options, write less. Coming back to edit Freaky Trigger kicked me out of my inertia and I’ve been very pleased with what I and others have written for the new site: I think it’s been lively and insightful and fun. It would be a shame if a knee-jerk snippiness on my part obscured that and if all anyone remembered about FT was that it liked ‘pop’ and was mean to ‘indie’.
Marcello’s solution – stop writing about music – I don’t agree with, though. I don’t agree with him doing it because his last few music posts have been excellent. I don’t want to do it myself because I’ve only just started enjoying writing about music again. But I am going to try a lot harder not to fight these old pro/anti pop battles, and not to reach for a dig or two at indie’s expense when really I want to say something else but can’t be bothered to work out how. My personal hope, of course, is that you’ll hardly notice the difference.